Lordy; Russian roulette for the whole family. Just forget to open it once, go to bed and you, the wife and children wake up dead. Splendid idea to post all over the internet there, Gerald; you cant.
You might have got away with that with gappy floorboards, rattly wooden sash windows and open chimneys in other rooms. Buildings are well sealed now and that is fairly certain to kill you. No air coming in means no combustion gases going up the chimney.
Stupid question:
Once the 'howling gale' is removed, the next barrier to efficiency is that hot flue gases go literally up the chimney. Is there a design of stove that prevents this? Having a 'condensing' stove in the same way as gas boilers is an obvious approach, but won't the condenser clog up with tar and soot? Or do some stoves burn so hot that they're as clean as a gas boiler?
Theo
yes. its called an aga.
Having a 'condensing' stove in the same way as gas boilers
Really it depends a good fierc hot flame is still pretty efficient at
50-60 degree flue tempsIf you are burning at say - 1000 C - which is not hard to get to and coming out of the top after baffling through the stove at say 100C, then the efficiency is 1 - 373/1273 or thereabouts so around 70% efficient.
Go up to 2000 combustion, and you are up at 85%... That's the thing about stoves, especially with long uninsulated stove pipes..high temp combustion and plenty of area to get the heat out of.
To some extent:
similar-looking in English cathedrals, but think those are mostly made of iron).
Looks like lots of people are knocking up their own heat exchangers, so apparently there isn't a commonly fitted design (to the extent there is with gas boilers).
Time for some more reading...
Theo
Gurney stoves, probably, cast-iron.
Theo
Presumably the term "carbohydrate" means nothing to you. Wood is slightly over 50% hydrogen. That's a strange definition of "little" that you have.
7%. Steve'a analysis, by contrast, is correct except I would say in one regard. Wood is cellulose rather than carbohydrate, but if you look up the chemical composition of cellulose you find it's slightly different, but not significantly so.
See Harry, they may only be 7% by weight of H in wood, but each two H atoms join with an oxygen atom (16 times heavier) to make a molecule of water. That's why the proportion by weight of water in the output is gonna be bumped up a lot.
get condensing wood burners.
Worse than that, they're saying that's the water content in the flue gas. (CO2 is 12% from the same source). Nitrogen will be the other 80%. Using their figures, the water content of the combustion product is more like 35%.
Although I hate to take issue with you, cellulose is a carbohydrate. Lignin and suberin are not, but conform reasonably closely to the same ratio of carbon:hydrogen.
We are, after all, only dealing in barn door wide estimates here rather than a calorimetric decomposition of wood.
whisky-dave wrote: [snip]
The point about condensing boilers is that the water that is being condensed isn't from wet fuel (mostly) it is a product of the combustion of the fuel. Methane (natural gas) has the highest ratio of hydrogen to carbon and is ideal for condensing boilers. After that, most fuels tend to approach a ratio of hydrogen:carbon of 2:1 with the exception of fuels like coke, anthracite and charcoal that are close to 100% carbon.
So if a condensing boiler can be made to work with oil, it should be possible to make one work with wood. The reason that it is not done us more to do with tar and acids in the flue gasses from wood burning than it is to do with the water content of those gasses.
And of course that for these fuels the efficiency improvement cannot exceed
2/3rds of that achieved for methane.However this is still way better than "Harry" seems to believe is possible.
all that I can see in my quick scan of it.
That's right harry stick to stuff you understand. "Wet wood bad, bang rocks together, grunt." At least that way you won't make so many schoolboy howlers.
Ah - so it is - you're right.
Indeed.
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